Past

Mårten Lange | Recent Work

Press release

Robert Morat Gallery is thrilled to be able to present new works by Swedish photographer Mårten Lange this spring season and during Berlin Gallery Weekend. „Recent Work“ combines works from the photographer’s three latest series:

“Citizen”, 2015, is a series of larger than life portraits of common city pigeons. “These animals are overlooked, hated even, but a this level of magnification they become individuals. I like that, the elevation of the banal”, says Lange. “We share urban life with the pigeons, an oftentimes quite hostile or alienating space, and they are citizens too!”

“Chicxulub”, 2016, is a series of images of flora and fauna in an area just off the coast of the Yucatán coast in Mexico. Here, about 66 million years ago, an asteroid hit the Earth. The impact led to the extinction of the dinosaurs along with more than 75% of all species on the planet. “The crater is half a mile underground now, so there are no obvious visual traces left of the impact,” explains Lange. “The question for me was this: How can I make a story about something that is so far in the past, something invisible, beyond the reach of photographic observation? My strategy was to invoke a lost world by creating photographs that had something violent, dinosauric, ancient or cataclysmic about them.”

“The Mechanism”, 2017, is a project about city life, technology and surveillance taken in London, New York and Tokyo. “The people are photographed from a distance and surrounded by urban structures. I don’t really engage with my subject. I am working from afar, like a surveillance camera”, say Lange of his latest work. “It is not about the place, but about a time. About the way people live today in urban environments. It is a fictional story about the future, created by looking at contemporary life.”

Mårten Lange, born 1984 in Gothenburg, Sweden, studied photography at the University of Gothenburg and the University for the Creative Arts in Farnham, United Kingdom. He received international attention and critical acclaim for the publication of his series “Another Language” (Mack Books, London) in 2012. Since then, Lange has published two new series, “Citizen” (Études Books, Paris, 2015) and “Chicxulub” (self-published, 2016) and is currently preparing the publication of his latest series “The Mechanism” that Mack Books, London, has scheduled for May. Mårten Lange lives and works in Malmö, Sweden.